Checking Sets of Pure Evolving Association Rules

Abstract

Extracting association rules from large datasets has been widely studied in many variants in the last two decades; they allow to extract relations between values that occur more “often” in a database. With temporal association rules the concept has been declined to temporal databases. In this context the “most frequent” patterns of evolution of one or more attribute values are extracted. In the temporal setting, especially where the interference betweeen temporal patterns cannot be neglected (e.g., in medical domains), there may be the case that we are looking for a set of temporal association rules for which a “significant” portion of the original database represents a consistent model for all of them. In this work, we introduce a simple and intuitive form for temporal association rules, called pure evolving association rules (PE-ARs for short), and we study the complexity of checking a set of PE-ARs over an instance of a temporal relation under approximation (i.e., a percentage of tuples that may be deleted from the original relation). As a by-product of our study we address the complexity class for a general problem on Directed Acyclic Graphs which is theoretically interesting per se.